Industrial #Wearables & #IoT

Posted on May 17th, 2016

Anupam Sengupta @GuardHat (industrial safety helmet fitted with sensors monitoring 42 conditions) spoke about the helmet and the data back end. The hat is fitted with camera and microphone along with sensor for biometrics, geolocation, toxic gas, etc. The helmet is not sold, but will be available as a B2B service by year end.

Over an 8 hour shift it transmits 20 Mbytes of data. A typical work site would have from 100 to 300 workers and up to 3 shifts per day.

There is local processing on the device and data are sent real time for aggregation. Time to detect an event is 2 seconds. At the aggregation point, external data are added: weather data, location data as the building site changes.

HPCC is the back end with Lambda architecture so the data can be processed both in real time and for historical analysis.

Design considerations include:

Lack of reliability in data channel; “event stop” – data volume exceeds plan (here several people are involved with the event); devices don’t send the data stream every time; schema varies over time with conditions; temporal sequence not guaranteed

Encryption AS 256 for data transmission and storage

Radiation shielding within the helmet

Tracking limitations as agreed upon by unions and companies to preserve privacy